My mother, Marie Beesley, who has died aged 87, worked as a psychiatrist in NHS hospitals for 40 years before retiring to practise at home in the sprawling flat in Bayswater, west London, that provided sanctuary to family, friends and patients for almost half a century. Her work in the early 1950s with what she identified as "the colour of schizophrenia" included experiments with electroconvulsive therapy and controlled insulin comas. Her method was "to watch closely, wait and talk".

She was born Marie Woolf in Buckinghamshire on the Waddesdon estate, which her father, Philip (younger brother of the writer Leonard Woolf), managed for James de Rothschild. She wanted to pursue literature, but her father insisted that Marie and her sister, Pip, should become doctors, and Marie won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, in 1943. Her interviewers included the Nobel prizewinning chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, who invited Marie to work alongside her.

Marie was drawn to poets, painters and writers – including Kenneth Tynan. While a student, Marie married Tynan's friend and collaborator Alan Beesley. Within a year, they separated and Marie resumed her studies, with a baby, my brother, Simon, to look after.

Following graduation, in 1951, she secured the first of many posts in a mental hospital, Banstead, in Surrey, whose "barren wards" she described in an unpublished memoir: "I felt I was looking into an undiscovered world." In 1961 she met my father, Louis Schendler, an American psychotherapist whose talent was to connect with disturbed young people. Theirs was a creative and mutually supportive relationship in which they regularly worked together in treating patients.

The many people whose lives she touched will remember her best in her Bayswater kitchen: feet up on the table, staring out through cigarette smoke over the glass domes of Whiteleys on Queensway, thinking, talking, daydreaming.

Louis died in 2000. Marie is survived by her brother, Cecil, her son, Simon, two grandchildren, Frank and Olive; her stepgrandson, Raphael, and me.